Former television newscaster and 2022 gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake won Arizona’s Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, early returns show, handily defeating her Republican rivals Mark Lamb and Elizabeth Reye in a race that was never seen as competitive. The Associated Press called the race at 8:44 p.m. MST.
Lake’s primary win sets the stage for a long-anticipated general election match-up between a MAGA celebrity and U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.), who ran unopposed, in the open race for the retiring Kyrsten Sinema’s seat (I.).
Both candidates have spent months trying to win over the center in this swing state that is also highly competitive on the presidential level. For Gallego, a Marine veteran who represents a deep blue district, that battleground-race pivot has prioritized tacking to the middle on immigration – no small feat for someone who previously railed against the use of Title 42 to expel migrants and called former president Donald Trump’s border wall “useless.”
These days, Gallego says there’s a “crisis” at Arizona’s southern border. “I’m not against border walls,” Gallego told National Review in the U.S. Capitol earlier this year when asked about his prior criticism of Trump’s border-wall policy and whether he’s running to the center on the issue. “I think border walls are part of an overall comprehensive security.”
“But the idea that you could just have one massive border wall,” he added, “in areas sometimes you don’t need it — it’s gonna cost you a lot of money. It doesn’t actually end up bringing security. And behind every border wall, you’re going to need to have personnel, you’re gonna have to have maintenance, you’re gonna have cameras, and there was really no plan. And you also got to remember, Mexico was supposed to pay for it. And that never came around.”
Gallego may have let his membership to the Congressional Progressive Caucus lapse in his effort to mold himself into a moderate. But unlike his Republican general election opponent, he has a congressional voting record that could come back to haunt him in the general. As NR reported earlier this year, he co-sponsored the “No Money Bail Act of 2016” to “discourage the use of payment of money as a condition of pretrial release in criminal cases, and for other purposes,” as well as the “Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act” in 2017 to “provide all individuals residing in the United States and U.S. territories with free health care that includes all medically necessary care.”
Lake has political liabilities of her own. To win over swing voters, she is running to the center on abortion and is leaning into a relatively mainstream GOP playbook on the border, inflation, and public safety. Though Lake has a knack for charming a Trump-loving Republican crowd, she has a long history of disparaging traditional Republicans and turning off independent voters with her refusal to concede her 2022 gubernatorial loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
She can also come across as a bit unsure of herself on policy. Asked by National Review in March how she thinks the U.S. should respond to a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Lake kicked off her response with the following: “We could sit here and look at every hypothetical and that could happen before I’m elected. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So I’m not going to sit and speak on everything that I would do. But I will tell you this: We need to take a stronger stance against China. We need to start investing in America. I support President Trump. I thought his foreign policy was brilliant in many ways and he put us on stronger footing on a global stage.”
On the stump, she often attacks the media and waxes poetic about the personal sacrifices she’s made to run for office after spending three decades as a television newscaster. “I’ve walked away from my career and walked away from a seven-figure contract — that was not an easy thing to do,” she said onstage last month during the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C.
Lake told conference attendees she was “actually kind of looking forward to having a quiet life.” But then, “God said: ‘No, no, no . . . I’ve got a few things I have planned for you before that quiet life. I’m going to throw you into the middle of politics. You’re going to end up in the middle of the political world. You’re going to help lead a movement in Arizona. You’re going to fight for election integrity. You’re going to be called every name in the book. The media is going to hate you. The media is going to write 100 percent negative coverage of you. You’re going to become friends with a guy named President Donald J. Trump. You’re going to run for office, you’re going to run for another office. And you’re going to actually win. And I really believe we are.”
Winning won’t be easy. As of this week, Gallego has an edge over Lake in most recent public surveys. It’s entirely possible enough voters could split their tickets to elect a Democratic Senate candidate alongside Trump, who has been polling ahead of the Democratic presidential ticket in Arizona for months, though Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket could shake things up on that front soon.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a landslide for Gallego, but at this point, I would probably rather be him,” J. Miles Coleman, an election analyst for Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told National Review. “He’s run as a Democrat, is broadly acceptable to most people in the party, and has probably done a better job than Lake of pivoting to take a lot of that real estate in the center.”
Also on Tuesday, Arizonans cast votes in a nasty GOP primary to succeed retiring Representative Debbie Lesko’s (R., Ariz.) ruby-red seat that was too close to call as of this writing. Around 8:45 p.m. MST, election returns showed Abe Hamadeh — who ran unsuccessfully for attorney general in 2022 — narrowly ahead of his lead GOP rival Blake Masters, the venture capitalist who lost Arizona’s 2022 Senate contest to freshman senator Mark Kelly. Over the weekend, Trump walked back his sole endorsement of Hamadeh and threw his support behind both him and Masters in the crowded primary, posting on Truth Social: “THEY WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!”